Moonlight Sonata
by xoxoLee
Summary: A quick stop on the road sets the scene for a meeting between Brian Kendrick and an unusual girl that's about to change his life. Brian Kendrick OC
1. Chapter 1

"Busy in here, isn't it?"

An awkward silence breaker in every way. I grinned, pretending to be witty, while I was fully aware that this was the only open line. The only people in the store were me, an old woman staring at the magazine rack, and the cashier, who probably hated me. The woman at the register stared at me with utter disdain, and I couldn't blame her. It was one in the morning in a random mile-wide hick town in the state of Indiana. Not exactly the most fun place in the world.

The store itself was on the verge of suicide. Parts of the ceiling had holes in it, the floor was dusty, and the light that lit the line's number sign was orange. I couldn't imagine what a girl like her could stay in the town for. Though I called her a woman before, she couldn't have been past her early twenties, a college student maybe. She was a pretty girl in a plain way, short black hair with bangs and a ponytail, and sapphire eyes that you couldn't avoid. Her skin was pale, so pale she seemed blue against the night sky peeking through the window. One ear was lined with studs and hoops, and while there were numerous holes in the other ear, only a single star and a safety pin hung down.

"Sonny?" I read as I stared at the name tag pinned to her vest. The way she stared at me, you would have thought that I kicked her grandmother in the shin. Maybe I had a hint of what could be mistaken for disgust in my voice, but really it was just curiosity. I had never heard of a girl named Sonny. My ID had been laying on the counter, ready for her to swipe, but we hadn't even gotten to ringing up my basket of items. The girl named Sonny picked it up, sneered, and looked at me.

With intended disgust she said, "Brian?" The girl could speak. Her voice was rather low and monotonous, born with sarcasm. The way that she looked, like a fairy or a pixie, whatever the difference is, I expected her to have a high-pitched squeal of a voice. The teenybopper voice that I heard more times than I wanted. "What's wrong with Brian?" I asked, smartened up to her game but almost offended by the tone she had taken.

Sonny shrugged and slapped my ID back down on the counter. "Nothing is wrong with Brian, unless you live with Donna Reed. Brian sounds like the name of the neighborhood kid that delivered milk bottles and groceries to nice housewives. You look like a Cleaver type of kid." Her sentences sounded like they were stitched together, the monotonous girl barely took a breath.

"What kind of name is Sonny, then? You make it sound like you haven't read your own nametag." The dark-haired girl began to ring up the things I had let sit on the conveyor belt. A bag of chips and assorted junk, a Jones soda, beef jerky and a few magazines. "Maxim? Really classy," Sonny commented as she scanned one of those magazines. I smirked.

"Sonny," she began, "is short for Sonata, and since you seem to know everything, you should know that a Sonata is a musical composition for the piano." I bet she got her rocks off by informing people about little things. She was probably the know-it-all in high school. Annoying or not, she was still an interesting person. You don't run into many interesting people in the middle of nowhere. "What does your mom do?" I asked as I watched her haphazardly drop everything into a paper bag. "She owns a thrift shop downtown." Downtown? I couldn't help but chuckle. Downtown had to be a yard away.

Sonny shoved the bag toward me, rushing me off to where I needed to be, but as far as I was concerned, I had all the time in the world. Everyone else was probably in a hotel anyway. I was an expert on driving all night to a show. "What about your dad? What does he do?" Sonny glared at my intrusive questioning. What was considered normal conversation where I came from, seemed like a nuisance to the cashier. "Forty years to life without parole. What about yours?"

Stunned, I stood there staring off into space. I had barely noticed that she was walking away from the line and pulling a cigarette out of the pocket below her nametag. With my bag in my arm and my ID in my pocket, I followed her as she speed-walked her way outside. By the time I was out there with her, she was crouched down by the wall of the building, the cigarette already lit and dangling from her hand.

"Sonata. It's a really pretty name. It has depth." I ran with the age old solution of covering up any questions I had asked before by complimenting her and trying to get her to forget that I had even said anything. Smart girl. I knew she wasn't buying it and I knew that it was stupid to try. Sonny took a drag from her cigarette. "Year fifteen. Robbed a bank, shot three people, two customers and a teller, and one of them died. He went to jail when I was four, so we came here to live with my grandparent. When I was younger he used to write to me about the musicians and composers his dad had him listen to when he was younger. He loved classical music."

With every word she said, I could feel the sting of peroxide in an open wound. It hurt. It really did hurt to hear her speak about her father. "What do you do?" Looking down at her all I could see was a mop of black hair and bangs, but I thought for a moment that I saw her smile. "Me?" It was definitely a smile. All she had to do was laugh, as cynical as it sounded, in order to give her secret away.

"I wake up every morning, make breakfast for my grandparents, and then go to the diner for coffee. Sometimes I stay at the counter and scribble all over my notebook, and sometimes I go help my mom at work. Then I go home, fix dinner for my family, and I come here. Then I do the same thing all over again just to save money to help the people I love and get the hell out of here." Sonny laughed that cynical laugh again. "I was planning on buying a bus ticket, like in the movies and that Guns 'N Roses video, but I don't know a bus that stops here. Now I have to buy a car and save for gas and all of that other stuff."

I might watch too many movies and read too many comic books, but as I leaned against the wall, and ashes dropped to the ground, I had a crazy little thought in my head. "Why don't you come with me?" Sonny scoffed in her crouched position, brushing off my suggestion at first listen. "Seriously. I'm travelling all the time. Right now I'm going to Tennessee and then I'm going to West Virginia. If you want to get out of here, I can drop you off along the way."

Sonny stood up, brushing stones and dirt from her jeans. I could tell that she was thinking by how her nose scrunched up in a peculiar way. "We're all alone in the middle of nowhere, late at night. Do you think I don't watch movies? You could just kill me right now and no one would know. You're not even from around here." True, but I could tell she was just saying things for the entertainment of moving her lips. While it was plausible, Sonny wasn't very concerned.

"I'm not a killer, I'm just a wrestler, which is the exact opposite. I get paid to be murdered every week." Informing people about my profession always came with the same couple of reactions. There were the people, mostly older women, that would shake their head and call me stupid, and there were the others that just stared. Sonny was one of those people. As she gave me a once over, I rolled her eyes and braced myself for the inevitable response. "You don't look like a wrestler."

Slowly I drifted to the car, dropping the bag in between the front two seats before settling myself in. Sonny smirked and dropped her cigarette, stomping it out with the bottom of her shoe. "Now you're in a rush?" She teased as she dropped her vest on the ground. She began to follow my lead, moving toward the car. "Sonny," I yelled from the crack of the window. She stopped and looked at me. "Can I keep the nametag?"

Within minutes, I was on my way out of that town and onto Tennessee with a strange girl and a nametag in tow. Sonny. I knew I wasn't going to forget that name.


	2. Chapter 2

Sonny was hardly the most talkative person I had encountered in my lifetime. While I had attempted to start many a conversation, she was much more content with rummaging through the junk in my car with a tacky country song she insisted on playing in the background. In the twenty minutes I had been driving I had already seen her pull out a lei, an old wrestling boot and a handful of ridiculous pictures.

"You're a little too old for comic books don't you think?" Sonny asked with arched eyebrows as she held out a magazine that had been in the endless black hole that was my car's back seat. Too old? Never but I didn't feel like arguing over whether or not there was an age to stop reading comic books. "It's not mine," I replied under Sonny's judgmental gaze. Defensively, I looked back at her. "Really, it's not mine. Paul must've left it here."

Out of the corner of my eye I could see her flipping through the pages and glances at the pictures. She didn't pay much attention to it and she wasn't at all interested in it but she was curious about everything. "Who's Paul?" She asked, glancing up from the book. As she awaited my response she set the book on her lap and turned back again to look for more junk. "He's probably my best friend. He's a wrestler too. If you stick around long enough maybe you'll meet him in Tennessee. He's a great guy."

The prize of the moment was a rainbow colored slinky that Sonny shuffled from hand to hand as she scoffed at my words. I looked at her quizzically, waiting for a dry statement or some of her quick wit. "If I stick around long enough? You really don't want me to around when we get there, and I don't blame you. It's your life and your friends. Who was I before today? No one." When the girl speaks it's hard to tell how she feels or how she's trying to make me feel. I think that's the part about her that kills me the most.

Sonny hardly skipped a beat, going on nonchalantly as I tried to clear my dry and blocked throat. The day before, she wasn't a person to me. Earlier when I had gone into the store she was just another clueless, sheltered girl in her little hick town. But I wanted her to be someone. I just didn't want her to call out my hypocrisy. "So…" I began, pondering the future just as I imagined she was doing. "What happens when we get there then? I can't just leave you there, you know."

"It's not like you have a choice in it," Sonny muttered as she continued playing with the toy. Why was she being so difficult? She had let the comic book fall onto the floor and had pulled her knees to her chest as though she were unbreakable. Did she know that she wasn't invincible? "I'm driving you. Isn't that a choice?" Whether she wanted me to see it or not, I saw her lips twitch as she resisted an oncoming smile. "Divine Intervention. It's just fate."

"Sonny," I warned, more sternly than I would have spoken to her in any other situation. I probably wouldn't be so serious with her any other time but I was honestly curious and worried about her. The thought of leaving her in the middle of nowhere just didn't make me feel right. Sonny took my warning for what it was and went on with a less playful answer. "I'll get a hotel. I have money in the bank." I waited for her to continue but I could see in her eyes that stars were dancing in her head. Sonny was on another planet, maybe the one she came from.

"Don't bother wondering what's going to happen to me. It's Tennessee. If I ever see you again I'll be on a country road with a guitar over my shoulder, heading to Nashville to play with a bluegrass band in a Western bar." Though the way she said it made me wonder if it was a serious thought of hers, the half-smile on her face told me otherwise. I was beginning to catch onto her expressions. Any type of smile meant that she wanted me to get off her back or it meant that there was a private joke flying over my head. Maybe both.

"You don't play the guitar." Matter-of-factly I stared into her eyes, challenging her to prove me wrong although I was sure, or at least good at pretending, that she was playing to my gullibility. "How do you know, stranger? I saved five kids from a burning barn one time. Anything could be true." Alright, I was stumped and giving into the idea that Sonny was actually capable of doing all of the above. I leaned back into my seat, my eyes straight ahead on the road as the car went under a cloud of silence like earlier. "I was joking. None of it was true," Sonny admitted.

"Really?" My tone was just as dry as hers, so much so that Sonny seemed amazed that I knew what sarcasm was. She wasn't the only one with tricks up her sleeve, but whether or not she caught on, I'll never know. "Do me a favor…seriously." Sonny listened and dropped the slinky on the floor, the makeshift Island of Misfit Toys. "When we get to Tennessee I want you to tell me before you leave. Believe it or not, I don't want you to disappear. If I didn't like anything about you, you wouldn't be in my car right now. I don't want you to criticize everything I say, but I care about what happens to you."

Honestly, I believe she accepted it without any doubts or questions.


End file.
